According to news reports, this sudden violent rampage was completely out of character for James Holmes, who was described as "shy."

The New York Times is now reporting:Billy Kromka, a pre-med student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, worked with Mr. Holmes for three months last summer as a research assistant in a lab of at the Anschutz Medical Campus. Mr. Kromka said he was surprised to learn Mr. Holmes was the shooting suspect. "It was just shocking, because there was no way I thought he could have the capacity to do commit an atrocity like this," he said. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/colorado-mall-shooting.html?page...)

"He spent much of his time immersed in the computer, often participating in role-playing online games..."

There is already conjecture that James Holmes may have been involved in mind-altering neuroscience research and ended up becoming involved at a depth he never anticipated. His actions clearly show a strange detachment from reality, indicating he was not in his right mind. That can only typically be accomplished through drugs, hypnosis or trauma (and sometimes all three).

His behavior doesn't add upHis behavior already reveals stark inconsistencies that question the mainstream explanation of events. For example, he opened fire on innocent people but then calmly surrendered to police without resistance. This is not consistent with the idea of "killing everyone."

Furthermore, he then admitted to police that his apartment was booby-trapped with explosives. If you were really an evil-minded Joker trying to kill people (including cops), why would you warn them about the booby trap in advance? It doesn't add up.

"After his arrest, Holmes told police about 'possible explosives in his residence,' Oates said. When police searched his apartment, they discovered it was booby-trapped and evacuated surrounding buildings, police said. Oates said bomb technicians are determining how to disarm flammable or explosive material in the third-floor apartment. He said police could be there some time."

None of this checks out. If you're a killer bent on causing mayhem, why tell the police about your surprise bomb waiting for them back at your apartment?

"He said pictures from inside the apartment are fairly disturbing and the devices look to be sophisticated, adding the booby-traps were 'something I've never seen.' One rifle, two handguns, a knife, a bullet proof vest, a ballistic helmet, a gas device, a gas mask, military SWAT clothing and unidentified explosives were also found in Holmes' car, a law enforcement source told CBS News. Oates said Holmes wore a gas mask, a ballistic helmet and vest as well as leg, groin and throat protectors during the shooting."

In other words, this guy was equipped with exotic gear by someone with connections to military equipment. SWAT clothing, explosives, complex booby-traps... c'mon, this isn't a "lone gunman." This is somebody who was selected for a mission, given equipment to carry it out, then somehow brainwashed into getting it done.

Officials say they have removed all major threats at the booby-trapped apartment of the Aurora movie theater shooting suspect on Saturday. They have used a robot to go inside James Holmes' apartment. ...They were able to disable a trip wire that was set to go off when the apartment door was opened. "This is some serious stuff that our team is dealing with..."

Shortly before noon crews were successful performing a controlled detonation... More controlled detonations were possible.

...there were multiple trip wires throughout the apartment. Investigators have also seen what appear to be mortars planted in the apartment -- sort of the kind of mortars that might be seen in a commercial fireworks show. Up to a half dozen of them are scattered around.

...they have seen a number of inflated balloons in the apartment... with many appearing to be filled with a powder. Also linked together are bottles of liquid. ...a strong smell of gasoline emanating from the apartment.

...several boxes on top of the refrigerator and there are lights flashing on the boxes.

...30 aerial shells (fireworks) commercially legally available for purchase. ...the suspect may have filled them with smokeless powder. ...entering the apartment would have caused a trip wire to trigger one liquid container to pour/mix with another. When the two mix together, they set off the main charge of the device which may be additional flammable liquids.

Technicians made a first attempt on Friday to disarm the traps, believed to include explosives, but withdrew when it became clear the property was too dangerous to enter. Sgt Carlson said the device was set up to detonate when the first person entered the flat. "We've defeated first threat. It was set up to kill, and that could have been police officers or anything," she said.

"In addition to the shells found in the apartment, jars of a kind of accelerant were also found inside the dwelling, said Aurora Police Sgt. Cassidee Carlson." (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044446430457754103267932...) "Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates expressed frustration on Friday with the web of wires and devices Mr. Holmes had connected inside his apartment, which were hindering the investigation into the shooting. ...It was unlike anything he had seen before."

FBI has a track record of staging similar assaults, then stopping them at the last minuteThis is not your run-of-the-mill crime of passion. It was a carefully planned, heavily funded and technically advanced attack. Who might be behind all this? The FBI, of course, which has a long history of setting up and staging similar attacks, then stopping them right before they happen. See four documented stories on these facts:

As you soak all this in, remember that the FBI had admitted to setting up terror plots, providing the weapons and gear, staging the location of the bombings and even driving the vehicles to pull it off! This is not a conspiracy theory, it's been admitted by the FBI right out in the open. Even the New York Times openly reports all this in stories like this one:

THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years -- or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts. But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. ...the F.B.I. provided a van loaded with six 55-gallon drums of “inert material,” harmless blasting caps, a detonator cord and a gallon of diesel fuel to make the van smell flammable. An undercover F.B.I. agent even did the driving...

Mr. Holmes's only criminal history is a traffic summons, the authorities said. He earned a bachelor's degree with honors in neuroscience in 2010 from the University of California, Riverside, and was a graduate student in neurosciences at the University of Colorado at Denver's Anschutz Medical Campus... He was currently collecting unemployment...

A decent AR-15 rifle costs $1,000 or more all by itself. The shotgun and handgun might run another $800 total. Spare mags, sights, slings, and so on will run you at least another $1,000 across three firearms. The bullet-proof vest is easily another $800, and the cost of the bomb-making gear is anybody's guess. With all the specialty body gear, ammunition, booby-trap devices and more, I'm guessing this is at least $20,000 in weapons and tactical gear, much of which is very difficult for civilians to get in the first place.

The mere manufacture of an explosive booby-trap device is, all by itself, a felony crime by the way. And remember: "Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said Holmes' apartment is booby-trapped with a 'sophisticated' maze of flammable devices. It could take hours or days for authorities to disarm it," reported Yahoo News (http://sg.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/suspect-neuroscience-phd-stu...).

Question: Where does an unemployed, introverted medical school student get the training to deploy sophisticated booby traps, tactical body armor, weapons systems and more? Certainly not in graduate school!

All this leads to an obvious third party influence over all this. Someone else taught this guy these skills and funded the acquisition of the equipment.

Update: An article posted on Sunday by the Daily Mail reveals Holmes had a "'mind-boggling' stash of ammunition" and "three types of explosives were found - jars filled with accelerates, chemicals that would explode when mixed together and more than 30 improvised grenades." This further adds to the financial cost tally of what it took to put all this together. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2177156/James-Holmes-Dark-Kni...)

The Wall Street Journal is also now reporting: "the suspect bought four guns over the past 60 days, and over the Internet bought 3,000 rounds for an assault rifle, 3,000 rounds for Glock handguns and about 300 shotgun rounds. The suspect also had a 100-round drum-style magazine for the assault rifle that would have allowed him to fire 50 to 60 rounds a minute." (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044446430457754103267932...)

Note: Some readers have questioned the $20,000 figure estimated here, saying this gear could have been acquired for only $10,000 or so. I doubt that, as all the extras that you need to effectively run these guns cost a lot of money: training courses, spare magazines, etc. Just a decent AR-15 battle sight (a holographic red dot sight) can run $1,000 - $2,000. Search "ACOG" if you don't believe me. It is also reported that Holmes bought 6,000 rounds of ammo, which definitely isn't cheap either, especially given that we now know half of those rounds were rifle rounds. It's clear this guy was spending big bucks. Whether it's $10k or $20k isn't really that much of a point.

Staged just in time for a vote on the UN small arms treaty?More and more, this shooting is looking like a deliberate plot staged by the government itself much like Operation Fast and Furious pulled off by the ATF (http://www.naturalnews.com/032934_ATF_illegal_firearms.html) which helped smuggle tens of thousands of guns into Mexico for the purpose of causing "gun violence" in the USA, then blaming the Second Amendment for it.

All this looks like James Holmes completed a "mission" and then calmly ended that mission by surrendering to police and admitting everything. The mission, as we are now learning, was to cause as much terror and mayhem as possible, then to have that multiplied by the national media at exactly the right time leading up the UN vote next week on a global small arms treaty that could result in gun confiscation across America. (http://lewrockwell.com/eddlem/eddlem61.1.html)

Even Forbes.com wrote about this quite extensively, warning readers about the coming gun confiscation effort related to the UN treaty. The story was authored by Larry Bell (http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/06/07/u-n-agreement-should...) and says the UN treaty could "override our national sovereignty, and in the process, provide license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights."

In other words, this has all the signs of Fast & Furious, Episode II. I wouldn't be surprised to discover someone in Washington was behind it all. After all, there's no quicker way to disarm a nation and take total control over the population than to stage violence, blame it on firearms, then call for leaders to "do something!" Such calls inevitably end up resulting in gun confiscation, and it's never too long after that before government genocide really kicks in like we saw with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and other tyrants.

WOW!! I hate it when stuff like this begins to make sense. It certainly helps fit a number of facts into a nice neat puzzle making a chilling picture appear. very scary. I can explain the lone gunman psychological motivation easily enough (without referring to childhood trauma) but explaining the amount of money and advanced skills involved -- wow -- that's tough to explain without referring to a third party. It's no nice and easy to think of this as a lone gunman creating chaos due to some type of mental illness or something but to consider that our own government would perpetrate such an act really punches one in the gut. Sad that it makes so much sense. It's also more rational than the lone, mentally ill gunman profile.

Chronicle • July 25, 2012 The Foundation"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes." --Cesare BeccariaEditorial Exegesis

"Colorado is a concealed-carry state ... but so was Virginia when a college campus there was racked by violence. Like the school, the theater chain was also 'gun-free.' In December 2007, two church members were shot to death and three others injured after a gunman opened fire outside the New Life Church in Colorado Springs as Sunday services were wrapping up. That tragedy could have been much worse, but the gunman was shot by a church security officer and was found dead when police arrived at the scene. On April 22 of this year a just-released felon went to the New Destiny Christian Church in Aurora, Colo., and killed the mother of Pastor Delano Strahan before being killed himself by a congregant carrying a gun. Unlike the tragedies at Columbine High School and the movie theatre in Aurora, there was someone at these venues willing and able to shoot back. ... The similarities between Aurora and the Virginia Tech massacre are eerie and maddening. In 2006, a Virginia Tech student was disciplined for carrying a gun on campus, despite having a permit. School officials were quick to note their school was a 'gun-free zone.' On April 16, 2007, there was no one able to shoot back when Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 people to death on a Virginia Tech campus. ... Few Americans are aware that in an October 1997 shooting spree at a Pearl, Miss., high school that left two students dead, assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a gun from his car and immobilized the shooter until police arrived, preventing further killings. Or, in another school shooting in January 2002 at the Appalachian School of Law in Virginia, a disgruntled former student killed Law Dean L. Anthony Sutin, associate professor Thomas Blackwell and a student. Two of the three Virginia law students who overpowered the gunman were armed, preventing further deaths. In February 2007, at a Salt Lake City mall, armed off-duty police officer Ken Hammond killed a young Muslim named Sulejman Talovic after he had killed five people, preventing an even larger massacre. Yet liberals will insist the answer to criminal violence is more 'gun-free' zones and the disarming of more potential victims." --Investor's Business DailyWhat do you think about "gun free" zones?Upright"[T]he gun lobby is the majority of the American people. It's not a lobby that's stopping all this [gun control legislation]. The reason that the lobby is strong is because it represents overwhelming opinion in the United States. And how do we know that? The president of the United States, who had this tremendous opening if he wanted to push the issue of guns after a tragedy of this magnitude could easily have done it and he has assiduously stayed away from it because he knows it's a losing political proposition." --columnist Charles Krauthammer"[T]he chain that owns the theater where the [Colorado] massacre took place has a no-weapons policy, which oddly enough did not deter the shooter any more than Colorado's strict laws against murder did." --Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto"When a radio host asked me what I thought of the massacre in Aurora, Colo., I had to ask for clarification. I said: 'What do you mean? Who could deny it's an unspeakable tragedy?' What he was really asking me was to address it in a political context. The problem is that I don't believe there was any political context to the shooting; not everything is political. But unfortunately, elements of the left seemed determined to graft political implications onto the event, irrespective of the absence of any factual basis for doing so. They seized on it both to demonize grass-roots conservatives and to pump new life into their perennial campaign against the Second Amendment." --columnist David Limbaugh"The news media ... believe they have a higher calling than reporting news. In order to understand this, I offer this anecdote. A number of years ago, I was asked to moderate a panel of judges that included a former, very liberal, California Supreme Court justice. At one point, the justice said that his role as a judge was to fight inequality, poverty and racism. ... People on the left think the way the judge did. The primary purpose of every profession, as they see it, is to increase what they call social justice. ... So when [ABC's] Brian Ross linked the Aurora mass murderer to the Tea Party, in his mind, he was doing the right thing. Is there one person in America who believes that if Ross had discovered a James Holmes in Aurora active in the ACLU, he would have reported it? ... [D]efeating the right is more important than moral or factual accuracy." --columnist Dennis Prager

Last Friday morning, just past midnight, a 24-year-old dressed in combat gear had opened fire in a crowded movie theatre in Colorado. killing at least 12 people and wounding about 60 others. It was the premiere of the latest Batman sequel, The Dark Knight Rises.

This has become a depressingly familiar story. The killer had no police record, was a well-educated white male and seemed like a harmless loner. He had spent months stockpiling an arsenal of lethal weapons.

If I were living in the US, I would be an enthusiast of tougher restrictions on guns, especially automatic ones. But gun control is only one answer; it is not the solution. Guns are much harder to obtain here in Australia than in the US, but I have lived in two cities where madmen opened fire (Strathfield in 1991, 8 dead; Port Arthur in 1996, 35 dead).

Over the coming weeks, the media will trawl through the life of James Eagan Holmes for clues to his motivation. They will dissect the dark messages in Batman, his family life, his computer games, his inability to get a job in California, his masculinity, his political views, his religious views, and even his engagement with neuroscience (he had just dropped out of a PhD program). No doubt each of these will shed a chink of light into the dark pit of his soul.

But the question we really need to ask is why a progressive society like the United States (or Norway and Australia) still breeds rampage killers. Western rampage killers are amateurs, of course, compared with other cultures. Just look at Syria. But why have wealth and freedom failed to snuff out this madness?

Nearly every year over the past decade a kooky but apparently harmless American loner has armed himself and gone on a rampage. Nearly all of these men – they are always men – live alone, have no friends and are estranged from their families. The two teenaged killers at Columbine, another city in Colorado, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, lived with their parents but had dismal family lives and were alienated from their schoolmates.

This anomie and alienation is exactly what our society fosters. Significantly, the most influential examination of American society today is Robert Putnam’s 1995 classic essay, “Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital”. Loners are the future. More than half of American adults are single; 31 million, about one out of every seven, live alone, making up 28 percent of all households. One out of every four American children is being raised by a single parent.

Sexual behaviour, which is the most intimate way of bonding with others, is deemed a purely individual decision – even though it is the gateway for perpetuating the human community.

In short, for decades our society has been trashing the ideas of commitment, connection and community. The idea that we can learn from tradition and custom, the idea that we must accept the truth rather than create it for ourselves, the idea that making music together is superior to isolating headphones and an iPod – these ideas are regarded with deep suspicion by many people.

It’s not difficult to track down the inspiration for this approach. The greatest single influence upon contemporary public policy is probably is John Stuart Mill, the 19th century British philosopher. (He is one of the thinkers whom the contemporary philosopher and activist Peter Singer most admires, for instance.) In Mill’s most quoted work, On Liberty, he contended that an ideal society should allow its citizens the freedom to do and think whatever they want, so long as they hurt no one. It is Sacred Writ for advocates of free speech, feminism, small government, divorce, harm prevention and other shibboleths of our own times.

It is in On Liberty’s winding sentences and caustic barbs that you will find an eerie manifesto for America’s lonely weirdoes. One of Mill’s most striking chapters lavishes praise on “individuality”:

“It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. Where, not the person's own character, but the traditions of customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.”

In other words, we reach our perfection when everyone is an “individual” pursuing his or her own vision of the good life. Planned Parenthood vs Casey, a 1992 decision of the US Supreme Court, expressed this perfectly: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

No doubt Mill would have agreed: what society needs is more people who have the courage to define the meaning of life for themselves. But where does this end up when “individuality” no longer respects society’s moral standards?

In the light of Friday’s events this passage in On Liberty has a chilling ring to it:

“Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

Mill failed to foresee the horrifying pathology of eccentricity in a society saturated with ideas drawn from On Liberty. His true individualist would be a genius smashing the bovine “collective mediocrity” of middle class values. What he got was a deranged individualist spraying middle class children with bullets.

We will never get to the bottom of what motivates these killers. Each has his own path to “eccentricity”. But we need to use this tragedy to provoke questions about the kind of society which has nurtured madmen like James Eagan Holmes. And perhaps the answer will be that rampages are the price we pay for living in society where technology, law and politics promote isolation, anomie and moral individualism.